Treasure of Darkness: a romantic thriller (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 2)

by S. W. Hubbard

  Despite his jokey manner with Jill and the dog, I sense a coolness between Ty and me. I’m not sure how much I want to tell Jill about the Play-O-Rama incident; she’s so excitable. I’ll give her a quick run-down later. But I need to tell Ty everything. When Jill’s back is turned, I gesture for him to follow me out to the van. “Help me bring in that box, Ty.”

  Mercifully, he doesn’t say, “What box?”, and follows me out.

  Once we’re behind the van, I tell him about what happened last night. “So, it’s not safe for me to stay in my apartment until we figure out what’s going on. Sean followed me home last night so I could get Ethel and grab some clothes. I had to tell him about the call from Ramon, Ty.

  Ty slaps the side of the van. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Ty, listen to me. These coyotes work for human trafficking rings. We’re talking organized crime here. We can’t mess with this ourselves. We have to let the police handle it.”

  Ty says nothing. He stares into the back yard.

  “Did Ramon call last night?”

  Ty shakes his head. “Nuthin’”

  I study him closely. “Ty, are you hearing what I’m saying? These guys know that we witnessed their crime. You’re in danger too. Now, are you being completely truthful that Ramon didn’t call again?”

  Immediately his shoulders go back and his chin comes up. “My phone did not ring. You wanna check?” He holds the phone out.

  I know if there is to be peace between us, my answer has to be no.

  So we head back into the house, both a little edgy, walking in just as Ethel begins barking her unmistakable “stranger alert” bark. Following the sound, we find Harold sitting at a card table covered with paper, rulers, pencils and a calculator. He’s utterly oblivious to the unfamiliar dog barking at him.

  “Hi, Harold,” Jill says. “Whatcha workin’ on? Your toilet design?”

  He looks up, roused from deep concentration. His bright blue eyes are calm, alert. “Yes, I’ve solved one of the constraints in quite a novel way, I believe.”

  Ty and I exchange a glance. Harold sounds so scholarly, so confident.

  “Bill Gates has a contest for engineers to develop a cheap toilet to be used in poor countries where there’s no running water. Harold’s working on a design,” Jill explains. “The winner gets $100,000.”

  Harold tsks at the mention of prize money and his eyebrows draw together. “Money doesn’t matter. This is vital work. Life-changing.”

  I actually have heard of the Gates Foundation project. Could Harold seriously be working on it? I step closer. His papers are covered with drawings of squat, toilet-like objects with notes and mathematical formulae in the margins. “What are you calculating here, Harold?”

  “The volume required to allow for a decomposition rate of at least eight percent per deciliter,” he answers promptly.

  I’m not an engineer, but the equations look plausible. Harold puts his head back down and returns to pounding his calculator.

  “He seems so normal today,” I whisper to Jill when we are all upstairs.

  “I know. He has days when he’s very lucid. He even makes jokes. He just said, ‘I used to work getting minerals out of the ground. Now I’m working on putting them back in.’”

  “You think he could actually win the competition?” It’s the sort of fairy-tale ending that would really appeal to Jill.

  She rolls her eyes. “There are entire teams from Stanford and Cal Tech working on the Gates contest, Audrey. Harold can’t win, but focusing on engineering is really good for him. On days when he’s designing, he doesn’t collect, and he doesn’t notice when I smuggle stuff into the trash.”

  Like a parent checking on a napping baby, Ty peeps over the banister at Harold working below. “How you know he’s not just playin’? Pressin’ the buttons on the calculator and scribbling numbers on the paper?”

  “I’m not sure exactly what his goal is, but the equations I saw made sense mathematically,” I say. “They weren’t random numbers.”

  “Huh. What makes him stop designing and turn crazy? When he does that ‘don’t wake the babies’ shit, he really freaks me out.”

  Jill sighs. “If anyone could figure that out, he’d be cured.”

  I drop a load of non-functioning flashlights. “Hey, since he’s so coherent today, maybe it would be a good time to take Harold to see the lamp. See if he can remember where he got it.”

  Jill’s face lights up. “Let’s go at lunch!”

  When we break for lunch, Harold is gone.

  “Uh-oh, his bike’s not here,” Ty reports after looking into the back yard. “You think he’s out collecting?”

  “Since he’s having a good day, he might be at the library,” Jill says. “He does a lot of research for the toilet.”

  “Maybe after he invents it, he can get one right here,” Ty says. “That way, next time his water gets shut off, he be all set.”

  Jill prods Ty with her foot. “Stop. Now that the water company has turned the water back on, I hope Harold will be able to keep at least one bathroom clear and open. He told me the other day it was nice to be able to pee indoors.”

  “Yeah, now that we got all the flower vases outta the tub, maybe he can take a shower. Mind tellin’ me what that was all about?”

  “Harold had a plan to bring garden flowers to shut-ins at the nursing home. Except there are no flowers in his garden any more, and the neighbors freaked when he tried to pick theirs, and the nursing home wouldn’t let him in.”

  “Where did you take the vases?”

  “That new florist in town. Told her she had to take all of them, and throw away the ugly ones herself. Harold won’t know they didn’t all get recycled.”

  Before Ty can make a smart comeback, we hear forceful pounding on the front door.

  “That don’t sound like Girl Scouts.”

  Ty and Jill look at me. Apparently answering aggressive knocking is in my job description.

  Three more loud raps. “Health Department. Open up!”

  Jill claps her hands to her cheeks, looking for all the world like the kid in Home Alone.

  When I open the door, I meet a short balding guy who says he’s from Palmyrton Building Code Enforcement and a thin, young man who’s from the Board of Health. They are, they explain, looking for code violations.

  Jill’s face has drained of color so her ever-present black eye makeup stands out in ghoulish relief. “Do you have a search warrant?” Her voice quavers, undercutting her effort to sound tough.

  The old guy snorts. “We ain’t the cops, lady. We got several community complaints that this house is a health hazard. We have to investigate.”

  As they walk through the first floor, I hear the younger one dictating into his phone. “Front and back door accessible…kitchen functional….one bathroom and one powder room functional…furnace and hot water heater accessible and functioning…stairs clear….two rooms totally blocked. Some rodent traces. No signs of extreme infestation."

  The men head upstairs, and Jill pushes me to follow them. “You’ve got to do something, Audrey!”

  Like what? Prostrate myself in front of the master bedroom? Jill has ridiculous faith in my ability to work miracles. “All we can do is wait for them to finish. I don’t even know what they’re looking for.” But surely they’ll hear the scratch-scratch of scampering rodent feet. Will that count as a sign of infestation?

  Given that the only part of the second floor that’s passable is the hall, the men come back down quickly. The older one stands by the front door, brow furrowed, scribbling notes. As he turns to leave, he hands me a sheet of yellow paper with some incomprehensible scrawl on it.

  “Wait—what does this mean?”

  “The home does not meet the conditions to be condemned,” the skinny young guy says.

  Jill begins to squeal. “We’re okay? We’re okay? Ohmygod—we’re okay!”

  The older guy turns to face me before he steps out the door. “T
his place is still a firetrap, lady. The roof, the chimney, the floors, the air quality. I wouldn’t spend another minute in here if I was you.”

  I stand on the porch watching them head back to their car. I wouldn’t spend a minute more here either if only I had another job to go to. But with each day that passes, the house seems to exert more pressure on us to stay. For a fanciful moment, I imagine the head rodent upstairs holding up tiny paws to silence the others while the inspectors pass through.

  Before they reach the curb, the front door of the house next door bangs open and Bernadette McMartin runs down her walk at a speed to rival a Kenyan sprinter. Her face is lit with joy as she approaches the men, but as they talk to her she stamps her foot and tugs her hair. “No! That’s outrageous!”

  She spins away from the inspectors. Joy twisted to rage, Bernadette points to me on the porch of Harold’s house. “I hold you responsible.”

  Chapter 23

  As my work day winds down, Sean and I have been trading texts about where I’m to spend my evening. Home is out of the question; Maura has a meeting and won’t be back to her apartment until eight; Ethel limits my options. Then I get a brainstorm. “How about Blue Monday? I can take Ethel, and the place is crawling with cops.”

  “Perfect. Get Griggs to ride over there with you. I’ll have one of the guys follow you to Maura’s when you’re ready to leave.”

  I hate the feeling of being constantly supervised, but I hate the idea of encountering the busboy or the coyotes he works for even more. The cops have been watching Fiorello’s and the Church of Living Praise all day with no sign of the busboy. Apparently he was working at the restaurant to fill in for the regular guy, who called in sick but supplied his own replacement. They both work off the books, so the owner has nothing more than a cell number to offer as a lead. These men seem able to appear and disappear at will, as if they populate a Harry Potter novel. Meanwhile, I live in 21st century Palmyrton, on display for all to see. My vulnerability makes me compliant. This is no time to resist Sean’s plan.

  Ty insists on following Sean’s directions to the letter, escorting me all the way into the restaurant, looking around as if he expects armed gunmen to spring out from behind the bar, and leaving reluctantly when he’s satisfied there’s no one in the place but a few off-duty firemen and two elderly couples having the early-bird special. Ethel and I settle into a booth and I pull out my laptop to work on my accounts until our food arrives.

  But first, I check my Yelp rating. Sure enough, three more negative reviews of Another Man’s Treasure have cropped up. After trying one last time to reason with Martha and getting nothing but screaming threats for my efforts, I’ve blocked her number on my phone. So she’s taken to bombarding me with email. One of yesterday’s emails contained the threat of a lawsuit, so I forwarded it to Mr. Swenson. Now I read his reply. Never one to be consoling, he assures me that I’ll know when this has actually happened when a process server hands me the papers.

  Great. Another unsavory person to avoid.

  I’m deeply absorbed in my accounts payable when someone speaks. “My goodness, you’re always working, aren’t you?”

  A totally innocuous statement, but my heart rate kicks up. I look at the man speaking to me: tall, thin, a little younger than my dad, holding an Anchor Steam in one hand. Surely this isn’t a process server? He looks vaguely familiar, but he’s not a friend. How does he know my work habits?

  “I’m meeting some buddies, but I guess I’m the first one here. Mind if I join you?”

  He drops right into the booth before I can respond.

  “You a regular here? ‘Cause I thought when I met you the other day I might have seen you around before.”

  Who the hell is this guy, and why is he acting like my new best friend?

  Then he unzips his coat, revealing a Princeton Half Marathon T-shirt. Of course—Harold’s neighbor, the runner. Ed, Ed Brandt—that’s his name.

  “Uh—sure, make yourself comfortable. Ethel and I are waiting for our burgers. No, I’m not a regular. This is only my second time here.”

  He peers under the table and scratches Ethel’s ears. “You look like a nice dog. Why in the world are you named Ethel?”

  “That’s what I asked the man at the shelter. He said, ‘Lady, we get fifty dogs a week–they can’t all be named Sparky.’ Since she already answered to Ethel, I kept it.”

  “Well, better to give a dog a people name than give a kid a dog name.” Ed stretches out on his side of the booth as if he owns the place. “Like our neighbor, Phoebe. Her kids’ names are Eunice, Tabitha, and, get this, Zeus.”

  “Zeus?”

  “Yeah, the week they moved in, I hear Phoebe outside calling, ‘Zeus, Zeus.’ I figured it was the dog, but then this little boy ran up.” Ed shakes his head. “Whatever happened to naming kids Mary Beth, Cathy and Bob?”

  Ed is undeniably funny, but I feel guilty laughing at Phoebe’s expense. “She seems like a really good mother.”

  “She is, she is.” Ed takes a swig of his beer. “Phoebe—our little organic, vegan, tree-hugging peace-nik. She’s an amazing mom when you consider what she came from.”

  “What do you mean? All she does is talk about how idyllic her childhood was in Summit Oaks.”

  “Oh, it was. Until her mother flipped out. Went after her husband with a carving knife. Two hundred stitches and two pints of blood later, the family announces he cut himself slicing an onion. Right.”

  “You know better?”

  “My golf partner’s sister was the ER nurse who treated him.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  Ed grins. “So far as I know, there’s only one reason a woman goes after her husband with a knife.”

  Ed may only be able to think of sex as a reason, but I think if I were married to him, I could come up with a few more. But I want to keep him talking. “So did Phoebe’s parents get divorced?”

  Ed steeples his long, bony fingers. “Strangely enough, they didn’t.”

  Despite his athleticism and a Harrison Ford, geezer-hot look, Ed has the personality of a gossipy haus-frau. So I figure as long as I’m stuck with his company, I may as well pump him for info on someone I’m actually curious about: Nora’s mother.

  “Speaking of crazy moms, what about Harold’s sister, Nora’s mom? Whatever happened to her?”

  Ed takes a long pull from his beer bottle and waggles the empty at the waitress across the room. I guess telling this story is thirsty work. “Sharon. Oh my, Sharon! She was the life of the party, and let me tell you, back in the early eighties, Summit Oaks was one big party. In the summer we used to put our kids to bed and hold the party in the backyard. This was before baby monitors—we’d just open all the windows. Figured if the damn kids really needed something, they’d yell loud enough that we could hear.”

  I have a vision of drunken leisure-suited men and big-haired women dancing to Donna Summer while their nightmare-plagued toddlers cry in vain, but I smile encouragingly.

  “Sharon was always the center of the action—organizing, decorating, cooking. That is, until her husband lost his job. What was his name?” Ed looks to the ceiling for inspiration. “Wow—I can’t remember. I can barely picture what he looked like. Quiet guy, kind of a nothing personality. Not sure how Sharon ended up with him. Anyway, after he lost his job, Sharon had no money for Hawaiian outfits and tiki lights and rum. Our parties kinda lost their zip. Course it didn’t help that little Frannie Ascher fell out her bedroom window during a clam bake.”

  “One of the kids fell out a second story window while her parents were at a party?”

  Ed waves off my shock. “Landed in a rhododendron. Not a scratch on her. Anyway, that’s around the time Harold moved in.”

  “Nora told me he helped her parents with their expenses, but then he and her mother started shopping compulsively and her dad left.”

  “That’s the short version,” Ed says. He has an arch expression on his face, urging me to beg for more.
One part of me wants to know, but the other part finds Ed increasingly distasteful so that I can’t bring myself to ask another question. We sit quietly for a moment. But Ed’s desire to talk is bigger than both of us.

  “During this period I was the North Jersey sales rep for Delta Pharmaceuticals. My territory included all of Palmer County, so many times I’d stop home in the middle of the day.” Ed winks. “Kids in school, wife alone and bored.”

  Somehow I doubt Mrs. Ed was all that bored, but I keep a blank expression on my face in hopes we won’t have to pursue Ed’s amorous history.

  “Anyway, Sharon probably did spend time shopping with Harold, but there were many times I’d see her drive off alone, dressed to the nines.”

  So in Ed’s overheated imagination, Sharon was having an affair. Maybe.

  “But where did Sharon end up?” I ask. “Her husband left, her kids left, and she remained on Acorn Lane with Harold. Nora says she came home from college and her mother was gone.”

  Ed leans across the table and lowers his voice, “Nora asked around at a few of the neighbors in the spring of 2005. The best anyone could recall, the last time we saw Sharon was fall of the previous year.”

  “No one reported her missing?”

  Ed shrugs. “If a grown woman leaves home and none of her family looks for her, that’s not the neighbors’ problem, right?”

  “I don’t know. All the neighbors in Summit Oaks seem pretty wrapped up in one another’s business. Did Bernadette tell you that Harold’s house passed the Health Department’s inspection? It’s not going to be condemned.”

  Ed takes a long swig from his beer. “Oh, I heard about it all right. Bernadette got her jungle drums beating the moment she found out. She’s called an emergency meeting of the troops to plan her next move.”

  I’d love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting. “Are you going?”

  “Can’t be bothered. I’ve got a ski weekend planned.”

  I want to ask him what he thinks Bernadette has up her sleeve, but just then the waitress arrives with my BlueBurger, and Ed spots his running friends at the door.